New work Here on Finnegans Wake and Large Glass

“Language is the core of all artistic and philosophical creativity, and as Jacques Lacan suggests: “We know as sentient beings that all we are resides within the domain of our languages” and that “The most complicated machines are made from words”. It has seemed to me at least that this concern with language in relation to the “visual arts” needs repeating despite the apparent obviousness of its substance. For instance, the figures in each of Hays’ latest visual and written works are morphed photographs imaginatively superimposed upon a world independent of the notion of history as we commonly understand and use it. Joyce in the Yawn chapters of the Wake works with the metamorphic human body as a crypt equivalent to the mummies of ancient Egypt that would be resurrected into a clandestine space in which its relation (yet without relation as such) with an absolute past, is played out. With the term “history” we commonly assume the passage of past time and past events, but in Finnegans Wake this traditonal assumption is undermined by Joyce’s syntactic play with his newly coined portmanteaus in such a way that “lines of flight” (in Deleuze & Guattari) deny the possibility of a single reading. That is to say, it adopts a form of language that flees all history because it escapes immediate meaning and in this way is associated with “the war machine”. “(1)